Of mouse and me
My family were out doing something enriching and cultured, about which I felt smug, and in the best way, the way where I didn’t have to do any work to earn the self-satisfaction about whatever it was they were doing (something at the library, I didn’t ask). Further ensmuggening was the fact that I was cooking dinner. Since my wife is a full time parent and I often work late, I am not regularly the one who makes dinner. This means when I do so, it feels a bit like I have gone above and beyond. This kind of thing in general is one of the perks we feminist men get: praise, gratitude, and smugness for once in a while doing the sort of things women are regularly, thanklessly expected to do (I’ve been repeatedly told ‘what a great dad you are!’ and variants thereof while out with my kids at parks and museums and so on; I am a good dad and I always take the praise as grist for the smug-mill, but to do so I have to mentally hold a pillow over the face of the inner child of mine who manages to gasp out ‘your wife never gets this kind of praise, she works harder at this than you do and people see it as ordinary!’)
The smug was all the more enjoyable because I was going to make something healthy, a root vegetable bake, mostly likely organic but I’m not sure (I didn’t buy them), and because I was able to turn up music quite loud, something I rarely get to do because everyone else in my family also has opinions about things like abrasive guitar and being able to converse while on the ground floor of the house. I mean, I have opinions on those things too, pro the former and anti the latter, while my family, annoyingly, has the opposite, and so, wrong, opinion on both.
Anyway there I am, music up loud, feeling very good about everything, and I open the bottom of the stove to get the baking dish out of the little under-stove drawer thing and in the baking dish a gray mouse about the size of my pinkie finger runs in circles in a panic. I say something tough like ‘holy shit aaaaaahhhh’ and slam the drawer shut and run out of the room. Last time we had a mouse, one of my cats spent about an hour torturing it and left a trail of blood across four rooms. That’s cruel but mostly it’s unsightly; if any of you reading this are my cats I urge you to kill and enjoy the mouse in private and leave me to enjoy the pleasant mouselessness that results, rather than doing the killing in my presence so I have to see the ugliness of your violence and of my own squeamishness.
I thought of this as I paced the living room. I calmed down, went back to the kitchen and opened the drawer again. No mouse, thank goodness. I put both trays in the sink, thought about the black plagues, washed my hands, went and played guitar a little, came back and washed both trays, and made dinner but entirely free of smugness and distracted from whatever it was I was listening to by thoughts of mouse and pestilence, irritation at my cats and at this stupid old house which is so easily compromisable by pests, and by thoughts of the silliness of my own thoughts. Smug and what I just describe are essentially my two main mental states, by the way.
The cats had been clustering around the oven and have continued to do so after this incident. I’ve had no further mouse sighting but the cats continue to be overly interested in that area of the kitchen. One is lucky to find small moments of self-satisfied escape but ultimately whatever happens the fundamental facts remain vermin and suffering.